In this essay I revisit Plato’s allegory of liberation from the cave through the work of activists, poets, and intellectuals including Black Panther Huey P. Newton, decolonization activists Eve Tucker and K. Wayne Yang, poet-activist Audrey Lorde, and Black Marxist philosopher Charles Mills. I identify several strategies for reworking the classical tradition, including translation, inversion, re-rooting, and historical re-materialization.

Read the essay (The Philosopher vol 109 no 3)

Given the fundamental tension between difference and equality, how do we have diversity without hierarchy? I look to ancient Athens for strategies, including rotation of power, subordination before higher principles, integration, and deliberate use of randomness (sortition).

Read the essay (The Philosopher vol 107 no 2)

The AI generated novels are not great yet, but they’re definitely here. To avoid both the Scylla of doom and the Charybdis of hype, the conversation about artificially-generated fiction needs to be grounded in the overlap of two realms: reading and human life. After all, how does writing happen if not thorough the alchemy of reading and living?

Read the essay (The Philosopher, vol 110, no 2)

Since Aristotle, contradiction has been outlawed from the truth. But that wasn’t always the case. Discover how a thinker deals with contradiction, and you’ll unlock the core pattern of their thought. For contradiction is not only a problem for thinking and knowing, but also for living and doing things together.

Read the essay (The Philosopher, vol. 110 no. 4)